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Posts Tagged ‘Best Interest’

Google Will Soon Allow You to Opt Out of Google Analytics Tracking

Google Analytics offers site owners an easy and free way to gather highly detailed analytics about their websites’ visitors. A lot of people, however, don’t feel comfortable with the idea that Google can track their every move on the Internet. After all, even if you don’t use any Google product yourself, you will still send personal data about yourself to Google through programs like Google Analytics. According to an announcement the Google Analytics team just posted on its blog, you will soon have the option to opt out of being tracked by Google Analytics.

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How Will This Work?

It still remains to be seen how this opt out feature will actually work. According to Google, the Google Analytics team wants to offer a “global browser based plugin.” This is a very vague statement and given that there is no standard for browser plugins, it remains to be seen how Google will implement this. It is also worth noting that a lot of users probably don’t know how to install a plugin. Those users who care about being tracked by Google Analytics will likely know how to do this, but it is probably in Google’s best interest to explain this opt out procedure in great detail.

Google plans to make these plugins available globally in the coming weeks.

Will this Make Stats Useless?

If opting out of Google Analytics becomes a widespread phenomenon, this could have wide-reaching consequences for site owners. After all, having detailed analytics about your visitors allows site owners and publishers to tweak their marketing efforts.

What About Other Analytics Tools?

It will also be interesting to see how other analytics firms will react to this. While Google Analytics is probably one of the most often used analytics services, other companies like Clicktale, Sitemeter and Woopra also collect large amounts of data from Internet users. Those users who want to opt out of Google Analytics will surely also want to opt out of other programs as well.

Google Opt Out Feature Lets Users Protect Privacy By Moving To Remote Village

Discuss

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Analyst: Apple will sell 35m iPhones next year, with or without Verizon

Filed under: Apple, iPhone

One of the questions that always seems to come up during our TUAW Talkcast and TUAW TV Live sessions is “When do you think Verizon Wireless is going to get the iPhone?” According to recent comments from Merrill Lynch analyst Scott Craig, the answer to that question is irrelevant to Apple.

Craig anticipates that Apple could sell 33 million iPhones in 2010, and that number would rise to 35 million in 2011 even without a second U.S. carrier. However, the upside to Apple in selecting a second U.S. carrier — possibly Verizon Wireless — is that the number of 2011 sales could rise to as high as 55 million.

Other Wall Street analysts believe that Apple’s decision to stick by AT&T for the iPad indicates a vote of confidence for the carrier, with analysts at Credit Suisse even going so far as to say that there’s a 75% chance that AT&T will keep iPhone exclusivity for another year.

While the analysts don’t seem to see a real downside risk for Apple, Credit Suisse recently downgraded Verizon from Outperform to Neutral based on the absence of the iPhone from their product line. It would definitely be in Verizon’s best interest to make an agreement with Apple to carry the iPhone; however, Apple is unlikely to make agreements with non-GSM carriers such as Verizon Wireless until they are well into a transition to the 4G LTE technology.

[via Cult of Mac]

TUAWAnalyst: Apple will sell 35m iPhones next year, with or without Verizon originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sat, 06 Mar 2010 19:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Adobe speaks up about Flash on the iPad

Filed under: OS, Software, Internet Tools

The iPhone and iPod touch haven’t run Flash natively in the years since their respective debuts, and it’s pretty clear based on Steve Jobs’s presentation yesterday that the iPad won’t run Flash, either. When scrolling through the New York Times’s main page, for example, where Flash ads or video might have been there were instead broken LEGO icons, big as life on the screen at the keynote.

Predictably, Adobe isn’t happy about this, and is accusing Apple of “continuing to impose restrictions on their devices that limit both content publishers and consumers.” They go on to say that without Flash support, “users will not be able to access the full range of web content, including over 70% of games and 75% of video on the web.”

Let’s work backwards from this. First of all, I’d be very interested to see where Adobe got those percentages. Apparently YouTube now accounts for a mere 25% of video on the internet? As for Hulu and a few of the other specific sites mentioned in Adobe’s rant, now that Apple is in the business of selling content, exactly how is it in the company’s best interest to provide access to that same content, through another company’s platform, for free? And as far as games are concerned, once again Apple has this covered, through the App Store. Far from being limited, content publishers and consumers will merely have to adjust to a new method of publishing and consuming content: one that doesn’t involve Adobe in any way.
I know anecdotal data is the worst kind there is, but in nearly a year of using my iPhone to connect to the internet, not only have I not missed Flash, I’ve been glad it isn’t there. Flash’s performance on Mac OS X is so abysmal that when YouTube announced an opt-in HTML5 beta to replace Flash, I bounced up and down in my office chair in glee. I can only imagine the bag of hurt that would be introduced if Apple let Flash run on its mobile devices.

If you want to know why Flash doesn’t run on the iPhone, the iPod touch, or the iPad, why Flash will never run on those devices, and why that’s a really good thing, check out this piece by Daring Fireball’s John Gruber. One of the key points of Gruber’s argument is that Flash is, by far, the biggest source of application crashes in OS X. Flash crashes so often that Apple’s engineers went out of their way to create a new mechanism for running plugins in Snow Leopard; in 10.6, Flash runs as its own process rather than being lumped in with Safari, meaning than when (not if) Flash crashes, it doesn’t bring all of Safari down with it. Considering Flash’s poor stability and fan-blasting, CPU-hogging performance on the Mac, gee, why wouldn’t Apple want it running on their mobile devices?

Want to see something that “imposes restrictions on content publishers and consumers?” Look no farther than Flash itself. According to the company’s own (possibly made-up) numbers, 70% of games and 75% of video on the internet is all shuffled through one company’s proprietary plugin. I don’t know about you, but that sounds awfully restrictive to me. It seems like a really bad idea to let a single company have that much control over the creation and delivery of the internet’s content, don’t you think?.

With the iPhone and iPod touch we already have tens of millions of mobile devices owned by tens of millions of highly satisfied consumers, and not one of those devices runs Flash. With the advent of the iPad, we can expect millions more mobile devices to hit the market, and none of them will run Flash, either. Thanks to YouTube and vimeo, HTML5’s star is on the rise for delivering free video content on the internet, and the App Store has gaming covered. There’s no telling what the internet will look like in ten years, but one thing appears certain: if things continue as they have, Adobe will no longer have the stranglehold over video and gaming content that it enjoys today.

[Via Engadget]

TUAWAdobe speaks up about Flash on the iPad originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 28 Jan 2010 22:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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FCC expands ETF inquiry, fires off letters to AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Google
Verizon might be getting picked on for introducing its whopper $350 “advanced device” ETF, but the FCC has decided that it wants answers from everyone on concerns that “there is no standard framework for structuring and applying ETFs throughout the wireless industry.” The commission has sent letters (via fancy certified mail, in case you’re wondering) to all of the other biggies — AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile — along with Google, asking a series of questions probing how each carrier’s ETFs are determined and applied. Google gets roped in for its nasty equipment recovery fee, but all of the recipients share a common dubious distinction: the frickin’ FCC — a bureaucracy filled to the brim with lawyers and… well, bureaucrats — can’t figure out terms that everyday customers are expected to understand. Of course, most customers don’t have the distinction of being able to send a certified letter to their carrier probing fees and require a prompt and complete response, so we’re happy to see the feds get to the bottom of this. Sure, ETFs may ultimately prove to be completely justified in their current form considering the expense that carriers put up to subsidize hot hardware, it’s true — but regardless, it’s in everyone’s best interest to make sure they’re spelled out in ways even FCC commissioners (and Engadget editors) can appreciate.

FCC expands ETF inquiry, fires off letters to AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Google originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 26 Jan 2010 15:26:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Why VCs Should Take Their Own Advice

The way venture capital firms are structured makes it almost impossible for outsiders to see what’s really going on inside those 1970s lodge-like Sand Hill Road offices. A firm is nothing more than a collection of partnerships around certain funds that run for ten years or more. So if a partner gets fired? Well, he or she is still technically a partner in an earlier fund, so firms don’t really have to talk about it if it isn’t in their best interest.

And if a firm was one of many that couldn’t raise a new fund last year, who needs to know they were even trying? Unlike a startup, any firm that’s been around for a cycle or longer still has enough money under management from previous funds to keep the lights on. If they failed to raise a fund in 2009, they can always try again in 2010. It could take decades for even the worst firms to “go out of business.” Like generals, bad VCs don’t die, they just fade away.

It’s an industry perfectly structured for sweeping problems under the rug, and as its fundamentals have declined over the last decade, that’s just what it’s been doing. But those big, lumpy problems are getting harder and harder to hide. Aside from rumors, it’s hard to know exactly who couldn’t raise a new fund in 2009, but we know the numbers were down precipitously. And slow economic recovery aside, it’s not going to get easier in 2010.

Limited partners, the institutions that invest in venture funds, are finally accepting what almost every VC I know has been saying for a decade: There’s too much money in the industry and it’s killing the kind of early stage investing the asset class was founded on. And that’s killing returns.

But just as we’re finally starting to see limited partners make the hard decisions to throttle back investments in private equity, so too are some VCs grappling with their own hard decision: Stick with a broken asset class and try to fix it or just leave and start anew.

Vinod Khosla was one of the first to make that decision: Leaving Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers at the peak of his and the firm’s power to get back to real, risk-taking early stage investing. Of course, his recent $1.1 billion fund flies in the face of the too-much-money argument, but it bears noting that Khosla invests in some capital intensive sectors like cleantech. Web 2.0 is a different matter. The capital needs are low, and, YouTube aside, the returns are low too.

In the last few weeks, another investor who I respect has made a similar move. Simon Levene of Accel’s UK offices has resigned the firm, despite an impressive track record that includes investments in MyHeritage, Seeking Alpha and Etsy. I spoke with Levene this week about the decision and unfortunately for me, it’s not a particularly juicy story. This wasn’t an intercontinental Accel battle royale. This wasn’t an issue where he wanted to invest in sectors the firm deemed dead. Nor was it a case where Levene wasn’t pulling his weight. And, of course, with investments in as varied and successful companies as BBN Technologies, Marvel and Facebook, Accel itself isn’t in any trouble.

It simply boiled down to the fact that, like many of the world’s best Web investors, Levene doesn’t see the best deals out there needing many millions of dollars. And structurally, a small partnership investing a $525 million fund with $1.5 billion actively under management can’t do a large number of tiny deals and still give each investment the attention it needs. As he puts it: “You see something that needs half a million or a million and you think, ‘That’s a good investment,’ but there are only so many you can do given the structure of these larger funds.”

In London, Accel takes a classic VC approach of putting at least $15 million in each company. That doesn’t leave a lot of room for the kinds of micro-deals that Levene saw netting better returns and frankly, the ones in which he had more fun investing. “I enjoy the bigger deals too, but they are fewer and far between, and they tend to be very competitive, so you have to pay up for them,” Levene says. “When it comes to early stage I’m just seeing a bigger market opportunity in Europe and Israel.”

That VC angst—while similar to what you hear about in the Valley—has a different twist in markets like Europe and Israel. In the Valley, it’s largely a reaction to more nimble angels and seed funds beating traditional VCs in the market. Funds have been forced to adapt or lose.

Witness Greylock’s hiring of uber-angel investor Reid Hoffman. Indeed, even before Hoffman’s arrival, forward-thinking partners like David Sze had been doing less-traditional deals. In 2006 Sze did two deals that didn’t seem to fit with the venture model and had peers scoffing that he’d never make money off either. One was Digg, where he could only invest $2 million, a fraction of the normal-sized series A deals at the time. The other was Facebook, where he invested at a whopping $500 million pre-money valuation. At the time, he shrugged and said, “I don’t know how I’ll make money, I just believe in the teams and believe it’ll work out.” In hindsight, he looks like a genius on both.

Sze’s approach —not just downscaling to do seed-deals, but investing without spreadsheet-induced restrictions at all — is similar to that of newer firms like Andreessen Horowitz, which does tiny deals as well as mammoth deals like the recent investment in Skype. Andreessen has said he wants a piece of the best tech companies in the world—no matter when they’re started, what stage he can get in and what price is necessary to make it  happen. (After all, it was pure, math-based investing that helped wreck the public markets.)

But in Europe and Israel, there’s not that same level of experimentation on the part of venture funds, nor are there many investors like Andreessen or Hoffman who have the clout, confidence and star power to say they’re just going to invest in what they want and trust it’ll work out.

The closest is Saul Klein’s firm Index Ventures, which has had plenty of traditional venture hits with Skype, MySQL and Last.FM, but has been open to plenty of experimentation too—much of it lead by Klein himself, a long-time angel investor and entrepreneur. Index has not only supported Klein in continuing to do investments from his seed fund, The Accelerator Group, it’s encouraged him on a project called Seed Camp, that scours Europe and Israel for good companies and makes Y Combinator-style investments in them.

So far Seed Camp has invested in 21 companies and mentored nearly 300. Klein brought a crop of them over to Silicon Valley this week to meet with investors, get grilled by the press, and get mentored by success stories like Google. “Given that the raw natural material for venture capitalists is entrepreneurs, I find it strange that the venture community does nothing to help develop those raw materials,” Klein says. (There’s much more on his blog about this topic here.)

For Levine’s part, he sees the venture industry in Europe and Israel as “still a work in progress.” He continues, “There’s more of an opportunity to pioneer and strike new ground. That’s part of what was exciting to me when I moved back here seven years ago.” Not surprisingly, Levene spent a lot of time talking with both Hoffman and Klein as he was mulling the ballsy decision to leave one of the top firms in the venture universe.

What’s he going to do now that he’s unemployed? He’s not saying yet. (My guess is he’s not saying because raising a seed fund takes some time, but that’s only a guess.) But the more investors who follow their heart in this uncertain time for the asset class, the better for startups here and in Europe and Israel. After all, that’s what top investors would advise entrepreneurs to do during a downturn.

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Mysterious iPhone model found in app usage records?
O iPhone3,1, where art thou? Last time we spotted that signature, it was buried in lines of code as part of a beta OS 3.0 firmware build. Now according to data from analytics software inside iBART, the San Francisco-centric transportation app has been host to a new visitor with the aforementioned device identification number. As MacRumors points out, iPhone2,1 was originally spotted in October 2008 and later became the iPhone 3GS about eight months later. Not that it’s necessarily the case Apple will keep to the same schedule — nor should it come as a surprise that the company’s maybe-kinda-sorta looking into a successor to its prized moneymaker — but if you happen to be in the Bay Area and see someone quietly pulling out a sleek touchscreen, it might be in your best interest to make friends.

Filed under: Cellphones

Mysterious iPhone model found in app usage records? originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 29 Nov 2009 13:32:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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